Comment from Cohen:
'It's terrific to hear all these voices commenting on this article and the one that I wrote with Martin Enserink. I do want to clear up a few misconceptions and inaccuracies in some of these posts.
Science published several news articles about CFS/ME before XMRV, and I'll paste in references in a separate post. Martin Enserink indeed covered the CDC misappropriation of funding that one post here mentions.
Simon Wesseley was one of many perspectives that Martin and I included in our article, False Positive, and we included him in particular because he was a co-author of a technical comment that criticized Lombardi et al.--not because of his thinking re: psychological vs. biological etiology of the disease.
Our article also makes clear that Lombardi et al. never presented XMRV as THE cause of CFS/ME. Yet it did lead some people with the disease to make that leap, and indeed, the use of antiretrovirals demonstrates how some believed its role was central enough to take drugs that can have serious toxicities and have yet to prove themselves in any clinical studies of CFS/ME. The supposed positive results with antiretrovirals in n =1 reports are anecdotes, and to claim they are evidence of anything scientifically meaningful is misleading.
Elaine De Freitas and Osler's Web put great credence in the HTLV-2 hypothesis. I do not know of any evidence today that supports this hypothesis. Regardless of how De Freitas was treated, no one has built on her initial findings, and it is not simply because no one tried. Most likely, it's because the hypothesis is wrong.
XMRV is, without a doubt, dead. The viral sequence reported in Lombardi et al. is the result of a contaminant. If other gammaretroviruses prove to have links to CFS/ME, they will not be the virus described first by Silverman as XMRV. It's no more complicated than that, a point that John Coffin made clearly in his Ottawa debate with Judy Mikovits. I think confusing XMRV with other possible viruses clouds the waters for everyone.
I do not know who the majority of patients consider to be patient advocates, and I of course cannot poll millions of people to find out. The notion that Cort Johnson, Bob Miller, and Marly Silverman are not advocates is inaccurate. I do not know their financial ins and outs, but advocates for many diseases make money doing their work--professional AIDS advocates are among the most informed voices out there, and polio's great champion, Basil O'Connor, ran the March of Dimes--and I think this attack on them is unfair and petty. I quoted each of them offering thoughtful perspectives, which, tellingly, do not form the basis of the ad hominem attacks here.
WPI did use VP62, in contrast to claims posted here.
Again, many thanks to all posters for taking your time to weigh in with your thoughts.
Jon Cohen '
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/09/insider-looking-out-how-people.html#sci-comments